El Salvador To Ask U.s. For Extradition

November 25, 1987|By Storer H. Rowley, Chicago Tribune.

SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR — The administration of President Jose Napoleon Duarte is moving to seek extradition from the United States of a former Salvadoran army captain implicated in the 1980 assassination of the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador.

At the same time, the first step was taken to strip the parliamentary immunity of right-wing political leader Roberto D`Aubuisson, whom Duarte accused Monday of planning the assassination. However, sources in San Salvador indicated that prosecuting D`Aubuisson would be difficult.

D`Aubuisson, a former army intelligence major, is a delegate to the National Assembly for the conservative ARENA party. He has denied the statements of a government witness, made public by Duarte on Monday, that he ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.

In a coordinated law enforcement effort by the Reagan administration, the U.S. Marshals Service on Tuesday disclosed the arrest of Alvaro Rafael Saravia, a former Salvadoran army captain it described as ``a major suspect`` in Archbishop Romero`s killing.

A statement by Stanley Morris, director of of the Marshals Service in Washington, D.C., announced that Saravia was arrested by deputy marshals Monday night at his Miami home and turned over to officials of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. He is being held in an INS detention center in Miami pending an extradition request. He was charged with failing to renew his immigration documents.

According to the Marshals Service statement, Saravia is ``alleged to have been intimately associated with the so-called `death squads` responsible for thousands of politically motivated killings in El Salvador in the late 1970s and early 1980s.``

The arrest was made hours after Duarte disclosed that the man who drove the car for Romero`s assassin gave secret testimony implicating both Saravia and D`Aubuisson in the March 24, 1980, slaying of the archbishop.

Political observers in El Salvador commented Tuesday on the timing of the Duarte announcement. It came the same day that leftist leaders allied with El Salvador`s Marxist guerrilla movement returned home from exile to test the political opening created by the Central American peace plan.

Guillermo Ungo and Ruben Zamora came back to explore the possibilities of working within the political process, running for office and trying to take advantage of Duarte`s loss of support.

One well-connected political expert who requested anonymity said Duarte`s announcement on Archbishop Romero`s killing was a crafty stroke designed to throw his opponents on both the Right and Left onto the defensive.

According to this analyst, Duarte now can answer Ungo and Zamora by saying: ``What you`re promising, we are already doing. What you want for democracy, we are fighting for now.``

Noting D`Aubuisson`s links to ARENA-he was its unsuccessful 1984 presidential candidate against Duarte-the analyst added, ``politically, for the next election, ARENA is now put on the defensive.``

The popular Archbishop Romero, a persistent critic of violence, rightist death squads and what he described as military oppression of the poor, was gunned down while saying mass in a chapel outside San Salvador.

Duarte disclosed Monday that the driver of the assassin`s getaway car, Amado Antonio Garay, had been found outside El Salvador by the government`s special commission investigating the assassination. He was then enticed to tell his story.

In a deposition Duarte made public, Garay alleged that the man who hired him was Saravia, and that he overheard a conversation between Saravia and D`Aubuisson three days after the assassination in which Saravia said, ``We did what was planned, killing Msgr. Arnulfo Romero. . . . As you oredered, we carried it out.``

An administration official in Washington said Tuesday that the Justice Department had been working on the Saravia case for some time.

He had been placed under surveillance 10 days before his arrest in anticipation of expected action in El Salvador, the official said.

A Salvadoran legislator may not be charged with a crime unless stripped of parliamentary immunity.

Justice Minister Alfredo Samayoa told reporters Tuesday that Judge Alberto Zamora Perez of the 4th Penal District Court had taken the first legal step toward asking the legislature to lift D`Aubuisson`s immunity.